Mao Zedong: A Film Analysis

For every New Year’s holiday, China's 130 million migrant laborers return to their native villages. This egress is the largest human migration in the world. The documentary films one couple who has emplaned on these annual hegiras for nearly two decades. The Zhangs departed their home village in Sichuan province and their children to seek job in a garment factory in Guangzhou for 16 years and travel back only once a year — like countless rural poor. This film represents both the struggles of migrant laborers and the issue of China’s rural-urban divide. It is apparent that the reformation led by Mao Zedong, a son of the soil, which has regularly been seen as devoted to believing in a more egalitarian social form, in concrete practice produced something alike to serfdom. In spite of some debilitating of the discrimination and bondage encountered by rural …show more content…
The migrants’ inhabitance elicited mixed response from the urban residents. Whilst there was an extensive appreciation for peasant work, urban workplace contained new structures of control and discrimination targeted against ones of recent rural origin. By the mid-1990s, it was customary in the media to define the rural migrants as “blind floaters,” formally known as “floating population.” One well-known journalistic account asserted that the ubiquity of rural migrants in metropolises was large, but their movement confronted knowledge since they were directionless. As affairs of policy analysis at varying levels of administration, they were known as floaters. However, according to surveys, the vast plurality had pre-arranged works in cities prior to the migration and that more than 93% of peasants had moved for financial reasons (Guang). Rural migrants were the indicators of new market connections to the reformers — far from being blind